Jimmy Carter Aloft

Unlike Bill Clinton, a serial moocher of private jets, Jimmy Carter flies commercial. He shambles through airports, towing a wheelie bag. He and his retinue of Secret Service men bypass security, board the plane before the other passengers, and procure the first few rows. Prior to departure, he takes a window seat, in order to insulate himself from his fellow-travellers as they step onto the plane and glance at him with tight smiles that seem to indicate pride not only in their sudden proximity to an ex-President but also in their ability to refrain from making a fuss. Then, after the plane’s door has shut, he stands up and walks aft, shaking hands, posing for pictures, learning all the children’s names. “It saves me a lot of headaches,” he explained last week. “It saves me from having them come up to see me during the flight.” (It’s hard, but fun, to imagine Keith Richards doing this.) Carter returns to his row and takes an aisle seat—“Rosalynn likes the window”—and the plane leaves the gate.

So it went, anyway, on the eight-thirty Delta shuttle from New York to Washington last Tuesday morning, on the second day of Carter’s latest book tour. The book, his twenty-first, is “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid,” a provocation that had him parsing words, especially that last one, all week: “I’m not alleging racism, and I’m not referring to Israel. I’m talking about Palestine.” It is his contention that the situation in the Occupied Territories “is not debated or acknowledged or even known in this country,” and that the “tremendous aversion” here to criticism of Israel’s policies has contributed to the disintegration of the peace process. “I can’t imagine a Presidential candidate saying, ‘I’m going to take a balanced position toward the Israelis and the Palestinians,’ and getting elected,” he said. “It’s inconceivable. AIPAC is smart enough to penetrate any sort of circumlocutions.”

Carter, who is eighty-two, was coming off a full day of interviews in New York (Rose, King, Gross) and embarking on another (Russert, Blitzer, Lehrer), but his zest for trumpeting his ideas and accomplishments seemed undiminished. He wore a checked jacket, gray flannels, and brown Kiltie loafers. Jonathan Demme, meanwhile, was shooting a documentary about him, to be called “He Comes in Peace.” Demme and his crew sat across the aisle, cameras rolling. They had even filmed him swimming that morning, in the pool at the Peninsula hotel. (“I do a variety of strokes,” Carter said, and it was a pleasure to hear him—an Annapolis man—use the term “Australian crawl.”)

Carter has evolved into a professional writer. “Most of my income comes from writing,” he said. He writes when he’s at home, in Plains, Georgia. “I’m a farmer still: I get up at five o’clock. I will write until I get tired, until ten or eleven o’clock. Then I have a woodshop twenty feet away, and I go there and I build furniture, and I paint.”

The plane had been delayed by an hour. When it took off, Carter reached across and lowered the window shade. He kept talking, over the announcements from the flight deck, about the privations of the Palestinians, each grim factual citation made in a clipped but doleful manner that he has perfected over the years. (It is the antidote to his famous grin, which is now deployed in rare instances of mirthful circumspection, such as when he is asked why it might be that, as he put it, “you won’t read any of this stuff in the New York Times.” Cue smile: “I need to ask you that.”) As he lamented the West Bank wall, he drew a map of it on the cover of an in-flight magazine.

Each passenger got a bagel in a brown paper bag. Carter tore his bag along the seams and placed it on his tray table as a kind of plate. It took him nearly the duration of the flight to consume half his bagel: he had a lot to say. He talked a little about the Iraq Study Group. He said that James Baker had asked him to testify before the group, but that he had declined. “I’ve been so adamantly opposed to the war, since before it started, that there’s nothing I could really add.” Still, he said, “I think it’s unquestionable—and I know how Baker feels, but I’m not going to say how he feels—that one of the main obstacles to any progress in Iraq is the lack of any progress in Palestine.”

Demme, across the aisle, motioned for Carter to raise the window shade. Shwip: there it was, the nation’s capital, framed perfectly below. Carter leaned over to look. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said. “I used to live down there.”

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.